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Einsamkeit, D620

Introduction

This long and important song first saw the light of day in 1818, but the composer continued to tinker with it for a number of years. The fair copy of the autograph is dated 1822, and this was probably made only after a number of adjustments and re-writes which could have been made any time between 1818 and 1822. It is this which justifies the inclusion of Einsamkeit within a chronological sequence of songs from 1819 and 1820. It is one of the first, and probably the most important, of the numerous songs that belong to the composer’s ‘philosophical’ phase. This is not to say the majority of Schubert’s great songs do not have a philosophical component; he was a deep thinker, in his own way, throughout his life. But during the period 1818 to 1820 he enlarged (some would say strained) the boundaries of the Lied by choosing to set contemporary texts for songs which were designed neither for narrative excitement nor melodic beauty – in short, not for mere musical entertainment. The Schlegel settings in particular were meant to be heard as something of a credo, underlining the composer’s sympathy for pantheism and the world of the spirit as glimpsed through the workings of Nature. As Romanticism took hold of Vienna in those watershed years it became almost obligatory for artists to nurture the unashamed ‘Ich’ of their creative personalities. The second word of the text of Einsamkeit is ‘mir’ – ‘Give me my fill of solitude’ says Mayrhofer, but Schubert is writing the music and ‘me’ also refers to the composer himself. In his early twenties he had the confidence, and the need, to stake his claim as a thinker and to identify with poetry which attempted to make the world, if not a better place, then a place whose mysteries were interpreted and enriched by poetry and music.

In 1818 Schubert had been invited to be music master for the two young Esterhazy countesses at Zseliz. Among the books and papers he took with him for this long sojourn of five months (June to November) was almost certainly a long poem by Mayrhofer, in manuscript. This was in six strophes with six answering antistrophes in the manner of an antique ode. (It is just possible that the poem was sent to Schubert during his Hungarian visit, but this is unlikely as the letters between Schubert and Mayrhofer at the time do not mention such a consignment.) In early August Schubert was able proudly to report to his friends that the work was finished; it seems that everyone close to him knew he was working on the project. The composer’s letter begins:

Zelez [sic] the third August, 1818 Best and dearest friends, How could I forget you, you who mean everything to me? How are you Spaun, Schober, Mayrhofer, Senn? Are you well? I am quite well. I live and compose like a god, as though it was all meant to be so. Mayrhofer’s Einsamkeit is ready, and I believe it’s the best thing I’ve done [mein Bestes, was ich gemacht habe], for I was without a care in the world [ich war ja ohne Sorge].

Schubert had every right to be proud of the piece, but his belief that it was his best yet deserves some explanation, quite apart from the fact that we know that he continued to revise it and thus could not have been completely satisfied at its completion. The publication of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte in 1816 had almost certainly both fascinated and needled him. Just when Schubert thought that he was building a unique reputation for himself as a song composer, cultivating a corner of music’s garden which was not of much interest to his seniors, Beethoven came up with a surprising and successful song-cycle – six songs linked together to make a continuous piece, the cumulative effect of which was greater than any one of its sections would lead one to suppose. Beethoven was a famed innovator of musical form, and this work was proof of his continuing mastery, if any were needed. Of course, this must have been taken as a challenge by Schubert who had written many a ballad longer than An die ferne Geliebte but never a piece linked together in this way. It is entirely likely that Schubert asked Mayrhofer to write a poem especially for the purpose. Thus Einsamkeit is divided into six sections to match Beethoven’s ground-plan, and Schubert took it with him to Hungary to set to music as a summer task. It is noteworthy too that whereas Beethoven, from the older generation, sets a poem about longing to be with the loved one, Schubert and Mayrhofer chose to give their work an exactly opposite viewpoint: far from wishing for companionship, the protagonist of Einsamkeit wishes for solitude. Thus the two cycles, written within a short time of each other, represent different standpoints of the new Zeitgeist – in Beethoven’s case Classicism tinged with Romantic ardour, in Schubert’s, Romanticism tempered by Classical models. Both poets were Viennese contemporaries: Beethoven was drawn to the work of the conservative journalist Jeitteles, better known as an expert on Jewish affairs than as a poet; Schubert was far more in touch with the latest writing and ideas from Germany than his older colleague, and his poet, Mayrhofer, was extremely ‘modern’ and left-wing by comparison. There is also a distinct attempt to outdo An die ferne Geliebte in terms of scale.

Einsamkeit is longer than the Beethoven cycle and, in its attempt to create something like a Seven Ages of Man survey in music of a single life, much more ambitious. Although this extra length does nothing to vanquish Beethoven’s cycle, Schubert’s pleasure in the completion of such a cyclic piece is entirely understandable: he firmly re-established himself at the cutting edge of Lieder composition. Because the work was in a new and different form than any he had written before, he considered it his best. It was also his lifelong tendency to favour his recently-completed music over his older work.

Right from the beginning we are made aware that this is no ordinary piece: we find ourselves in Schubert’s song theatre to hear a work staged, lit and conducted by the composer without the need for any of the paraphernalia of operatic performance. Indeed, it is with music in the home that we can best detect Schubert’s dramatic genius; it is different from Mozart’s and that of other successful opera composers, but no less valid in its more economical way. Many signs of this were apparent in the composer’s youth, with hair-raising ballads with poems by Pfeffel and Schiller, Bertrand and Kenner, but those works stand apart from the Lieder. Einsamkeit is the last time in Schubert’s song output that we shall hear a piece on this scale but, as John Reed points out, this should not be considered the last of the solo cantatas but rather the first of the song cycles.

Recordings

'This would have been a massive project for even the biggest international label, but from a small independent … it is a miracle. An ideal Christ ...'Please give me the complete Hyperion Schubert songs set – all 40 discs –and, in the next life, I promise I'll "re-gift" it to Schubert himself … ...» More

'One of the most rewarding CDs to date in this whole, comprehensive Lieder Edition. Utterly absorbing' (Gramophone)'Lipovsek provides a feast of marvellous singing. She has one of the most beautiful mezzo voices around at the moment. A great addition to the series' ...» More

‘Give me my fill of solitude!’ In the valley, bedecked with snowy blossom, a cathedral soars up, and nearby the abbey in the Gothic style, devout and calm, like its founder, haven and refuge of the weary. Here unending contemplation brings sacred refreshment to the spirit.

But the young man, even in his consecrated cell, is tortured by ever more ardent longings. A wild torrent pours forth from his breast. He seeks to stem it, but in a single moment his fragile, tranquil happiness is swept away by the flood.

1: The opening, in the original key, is in B flat. The introduction is seven bars of semibreves, one chord per bar. In orchestral terms these would be for brass, a fate motif perhaps, as part of an operatic overture. On the printed page these empty rings of black-encircled stave-lines give the music a bleak and ascetic look, and so they sound. At the entry of the voice (‘Gib mir die Fülle der Einsamkeit!’) we are introduced to our protagonist who immediately strikes as serious and noble, if somewhat gloomy. But then comes a piano interlude which contains one of Schubert’s loveliest turns of phrase: the right hand of the piano descends in a long musical sigh and then jumps a seventh so eloquently that we immediately hear the humanity, and the humility, of the singer’s quest. The idealized picture of life at the abbey which follows is directly from Mayrhofer’s youth. His father had wanted him to be a priest and he had gone to the famous St Florian monastery as a novice. He spent three years there (from the age of nineteen in 1806) and had studied theology and philology. At the age of twenty-three he decided to change to law but it is obvious that much of the strength of the man (and some of the problems, no doubt) were formed by monastic life. This is perhaps the most difficult section of the work to sing because it lies rather high and requires the utmost poise and peace. The accompaniment is nothing more than calm minims betokening the order and regularity of everyday life at the abbey. This was written before Schubert had visited Upper Austria with Vogl (in 1819 and 1825) but he must have heard about life at the great monasteries from a number of his friends, including Mayrhofer.

2: The music for the second strophe (the so-called ‘antistrophe’ to the first) is marked ‘Geschwind’. Here, perhaps, we have an autobiographical explanation from Mayrhofer about why he could not endure the life of a monk: unable to settle down to the cloistered life, he was too attracted by the excitements of life in the big city. In stark contrast to the first verse the music suddenly becomes driven with pulsating semiquavers and throbbing off-beat quavers that paw the ground as restlessly as a nervous steed before a race. Mayrhofer’s use of metaphor (‘ein wilder Strom entspringt’) here allows the composer to indulge in his favourite water-music illustrations, and this is perhaps an opportunity deliberately set up for Schubert by the poet. We hear echoes of the storm music of Der Taucher and prophecies of works like Miriams Siegesgesang with its Red Sea music. The fortissimo diminished chords that frame ‘Und in einem Augenblick’, and the tremolo shudder at ‘Ist der Ruhe zartes Glück’ are over-the-top in the grand manner – and memories are stirred of gruesome moments in earlier ballads. We can also detect the sound of Vogl’s artistic personality, and who should Schubert and Mayrhofer have had in mind to sing this work other than that soon-to-retire singing actor? The happiness of a sheltered life is swept away like so many pieces of flotsam and jetsam, and the semiquaver water-music interlude makes this clear. The whole of this section is very harmonically unsettled and passes through many flat keys, eventually settling on E flat7; the first words of the next strophe (‘Gib mir die Fülle der Tätigkeit!’) are accompanied by a loud G sharp minor chord – a sharply dramatic wrench.

‘Give me my fill of activity!’ Everywhere there are throngs of people; coaches pass each other, throwing up dust; customers crowd around shops; red gold and dazzling stones tempt the hesitant inside. Masked balls and plays are a substitute for the green countryside.

But in the magnificent palaces, amid noisy, joyful banquets, the flower of melancholy springs up, and lowers her head towards the sanctuary of his happy, innocent youth, to the blue land of shepherds and the edge of the sparkling stream. Alas, that he had to depart!

3: This section seems obviously influenced by the third song of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte – ‘Leichte Siegler in den Höhen’. After the stately declamatory recitative-like bars which mark of the beginning of every new section in this piece (‘Gib mir’ this or that), the darting triplets in the piano feel remarkably familiar under the hands of those who have played the Beethoven cycle. This accompaniment paints clouds and streams in An die ferne Geliebte, but Schubert uses mercurial movement to plunge us into the bustle of the ‘Tätigkeit’ of contemporary city life; nowhere else in Schubert’s Lieder are shops mentioned, and the drumming-up of custom through window-displays makes the reference even more modern. The shock of these mundane allusions is deliberately meant as a sudden contrast to the other-worldly peace of the opening. (The stories of the prodigal son and the rake’s progress can now be added to the seven ages of man as sources for Mayrhofer’s survey.) The incessant triplets seem illustrative of babble and gossip and a life empty of interior contemplation. This leads naturally into the entertainment of city life – ‘Maskenball und Bühne’. As an interlude-commentary, Schubert provides music with rhythmic energy (the equivalent of today’s pop music for disco dancing) but devoid of any interesting harmonic content. All that prancing about begins to pall before too long, and merry E major is replaced by a tired E minor in another extended piano interlude.

4: This is a soulful section beginning in C major (4/4 changes to 3/4) where introspection once again replaces mindless merrymaking. The syncopated rhythm denotes unease and the ache of nostalgia. There is a modulation into D major at ‘Seiner Jugend Unschuldlust’ which introduces the green pastures of youth and an idealized landscape of shepherds and shepherdesses. The ‘blauen Hirtenland’ is painted with horn-like motifs of thirds and sixths in the accompaniment, and a short passage of recitative (‘Ach, dass er hinweg gemusst!’) expresses regret at leaving this idyllic life.

‘Give me the pleasure of good company!’ Friends, cheerfully seated at table, strike up a song to smooth life’s rocky path. Up we go to the fair hills, and down to the dancing river; our affection grows ever stronger, and other firm, devoted attachments are formed.

But when friends have parted his peace is gone. Pierced by the pain of longing he gazes heavenwards; there the star of love shines. Love calls in the balmy air; love wafts from the fragrant flowers, and his inmost being is vibrant with love.

5: Once again we have the expansive recitative phrase (in this case ‘Gib mir das Glück der Geselligkeit!’) which is the recurring feature of this song – slightly faster than usual, to go with the words. The key of A minor moves into F major via C major. Schubert has a happy time with the Ländler music here which is marked ‘Ziemlich geschwind’; a very Viennese and ‘gemütlich’ atmosphere is created, one which suggests communal singing (‘Genossen … stimmen Chorus an’), foaming flagons of beer and thigh-slapping good humour. This is heartier music than, say, Seligkeit which is also in 6/8, but not without subtlety: particularly piquant is the twang of bare fourths in the right-hand accompaniment (first heard after ‘Und ebenen die Felsenbahn!’) which suggests rustic outdoor music – in this case probably a Heuriger band. This conviviality is set up to be knocked down of course. In the interlude following ‘Mit treuer, kräftiger Verzweigung’ those same fourths sounds empty and forlorn, and Schubert constructs a splendid decrescendo effect, like someone sinking into depression after the party is over and all the guests have left. ‘Doch, wenn die Genossen schieden’ is unaccompanied and sung into a void, with faint echoes and fragments of the Ländler music punctuating his thoughts and coming back to haunt him. The mood changes to something much more lyrical as snatches of melody give way to flowing triplets, a transition to the next strophe.

6: It is clear that Cupid’s dart has pierced the singer’s heart and that the cheerful company of the many can be no substitute for that of the preferred one. This initiates one of Schubert’s florid songs of rapt devotion typical of this period – ornate and rather Italianate vocal lines with much melisma, accompanied by triplets and with long and difficult-to-breathe vocal lines. Blondel zu Marien was composed only a few weeks later and has many of the same characteristics: like this section of Einsamkeit, it has a 12/8 time signature, and is in the key of E flat minor. Both songs yearn for love in an almost religiously idealistic way. The word ‘Liebe’ is set high in the vocal line, and because it is the word called out by the breezes is placed into inverted commas by the music. The plangency of this particular G flat reminds one of the power of the words ‘Ich denke dein’ when set to the same note, at the opening of Nähe des Geliebten. E flat minor shifts to G flat major and then, via the common pivotal note of G flat/F sharp, the music melts into D major at ‘Und sein Inn’res Liebe hallt’. Such a change, typical of Schubert’s ability to illustrate the deeper meaning of words with the use of harmonic relationships, takes us as if by magic into the inmost being of the narrator.

‘Give me my fill of bliss!’ Now he walks, enraptured, holding her hand in silent communion, along the avenue of beech trees, beside the clear brook; and even if he has to walk through deserts her sweet eyes will shine for him. Amid the most hostile confusion he trusts his fair guide.

But the tombs of his great forebears, the crowns of conquerors, the ensigns of war, allow him no further peace. He must do as they, and like them become immortal. See, he mounts his noble steed, tests his shining sword with a flourish, and rides into battle.

7: ‘Gib mir die Fülle der Seligkeit!’ is the only one of these grand opening statements which shows any rapture or ecstasy, the curve of the phrase rising and falling in the arch of a seventh. The aria which follows is even more tricky than the preceding one – a real vocal challenge in terms of bel canto. The walk with the beloved ‘an weissen Bächen’ is another perfect excuse for water music, and like the Mayrhofer Am Strome (1817) and Der Neugierige from Die schöne Müllerin, Schubert chooses the key of B major for this sumptuous cavatina. The long and demanding phrases require considerable vocal dexterity to negotiate all the corners and turns, but the effect of all this use of melisma is to emphasize the state of being drunk with rapture. At the passage ‘Und muss er auch durch Wüsteneien’ the voice feels its way hanging on to the top of the stave as if on a tightrope in the dark; the bass chords offer support as they point the harmonic way like beacons of light.

8: This antistrophe transports the scene from loving peace to war, and it is perhaps the most contrived part of the poem. It is here if anywhere that one agrees with Capell when he writes that ‘Mayrhofer’s hero is, after all, only an abstraction. We can take no personal interest in him’. There are many points in the poem where we feel that the poet is writing from the heart and from real experience (the opening section about abbey life, for instance) but mention of ‘great forebears’ and immortality offers no such insurance against boredom and is the flimsiest of medieval painted cardboard. Schubert’s music is here nearest to the blood and thunder of the early years – a work like Adelwold und Emma for instance. In the battle music at ‘Sieh, er steigt aufs hohe Pferd’ the composer reverts to his teenage manner, and the piano interlude is reminiscent of Die Nonne where the nun tramples on her faithless lover’s heart (after digging up his body). In performance this section is brief enough to sound passingly impressive; hammered F sharp major chords and arpeggios at the bottom of the keyboard make a good transition to the held D7 chord which announces the next section.

‘Give me my fill of gloom!’ There they lie, stretched out in their own blood, who first defied terror, their lips rigid, their eyes wild with death. No father comes back to his family; a quite different army returns home; and those who have lost their dearest in the war now bid that army a sorrowful welcome.

His fatherland’s guardians now appear to him as incensed murderers, nurturing noble freedom with the red blood of mankind. And he curses giddy fame, exchanging noisy tumult for the cool, green forest; for a hermit’s life.

9: ‘Gib mir die Fülle der Düsterkeit!’: in itself rather a strange thing to ask for, but it is nearer the poet’s own character than some of the song’s other requests. This section contains some of the most unusual words that Schubert ever set. We know that the composer grew up in times of war, and that the whole comfortable and blinkered world of Biedermeier was a reaction against the horrors of combat experienced by the whole of Europe in the time of Napoleon. The composer himself and most of his friends had been spared active military service (they were mostly just too young – an exception was the poet Theodor Körner whom the composer idolized, and who paid with his life); but like young men growing up in the 1920s the Schubertians could hardly have been spared detailed and gory tales of life on the battlefield, and the daily sight of the walking wounded for years afterwards. The effect of this on Schubert’s generation was surely the same as on those who grew up in the wake of the First World War – it made them profoundly anti-war. There are a number of warrior’s songs in the Schubert repertoire (the most moving of them Kriegers Ahnung from Schwanengesang where a soldier struggles with presentiments of death) but there is none which paints the devastation of the battlefield as vividly as this. (This chimes with the anti-war feelings that we read in the composer’s letter to his brother Ferdinand on 21 September 1825.) The musical manner is grandiose and pomposo – the passage is marked ‘Sehr langsam’ and is made up of double-dotted figuration in the manner of Handel. The use of insistent dotted rhythms in an ironic manner, grimly triumphant and pitiless in its depiction of the ranks of the dead, is astonishingly prophetic of Mussorgsky’s Commander-in-Chief, the last of his Songs and Dances of Death.

10: This strophe is a cleverly managed recitative which, while the piano climbs a scale of semitones in agitated interjections, conveys the idea of the scales falling from hero’s eyes. Gradually he sees that the fatherland’s guardians are really only murderers, using the catchword of freedom as an excuse for bloodshed and the greed of political advantage. Here, surely, is the core of Mayrhofer’s own political beliefs: anti-state, anti-xenophobic, almost pacifist – a composer like Britten might gladly have set these words to music in the 1930s. This song was written only five years after the Befreiungskrieg, the war which rid Austria of French domination. A work which dismissed the ‘Vaterlandes Wächter’ as nothing more than ‘Brüderschlächter’ – ‘brother murderers’ – would be controversial with many an old soldier and patriotic member of the audience (the whole concept of Bruderschaft had, in any case, dangerous political connotations). Moreover it would be unlikely to find publication or to pass the censors. The editors of the Neue Schubert Ausgabe however, when pondering why the composer (if he was so proud of the piece) failed to deliver Einsamkeit to a publisher, came the conclusion that Schubert was dissatisfied with the tonal scheme because the piece ended in a different key from the one in which it had begun. In any case this bridge passage enables the work to come full circle, in literary terms at least, for Mayrhofer is determined to have his hero end up as a loner. After the revelatory recitative which uncovers fame as a curse, the music melts into a meditative cantilena which places the protagonist back in the cool of the forests. The music is pivoted around the key of B major, a tonality which Schubert always used as harmonic balm.

‘Give me the consecration of solitude!’ Through the darkness of dense pines the sun only half penetrates, and paints the beds of needles with a dusky hue. The cuckoo calls from the thicket, the woodpecker pecks at the grey bark, and the bold torrent thunders over the barrier of rocks.

Whatever he desired, whatever he loved, whatever brought him joy and pain floats past with gentle rapture, as if in the glow of evening. Solitude, the young man’s longing, is now the old man’s lot, and a harsh, arduous life has finally led to happiness.

11: This is arguably the most beautiful section of the piece. The B major of the preceding section allows a magical change into G major for the final ‘chapter heading’ of the work, ‘Gib mir die Weihe der Einsamkeit!’ This change is one of self-discovery and revelation. Much is revealed to the dreamer in Nacht und Träume where the same key change between sections betokens a deepening of sleep and a sharpening of perception. Schubert does not disappoint in making this last request the most beautiful of all, also the calmest, the most mature, and the most full of human experience. And so must it be if this song, in the spirit of picaresque novel or Bildungsroman, is to make its point. The secret of this lies in the setting of ‘Weihe’ which seems to contain the holy feeling of a pilgrim receiving a blessing at the end of a long journey; apart from a softening of harmony (less block-like, more human) there is also a tiny moment where the bass is ornamented with demisemiquavers: in this full collaboration between the hands, it is as if we have a coming together of a whole personality at last. The final song is one of Schubert’s most lovely creations; based on an ever-recurring triplet figuration (mostly, but not always, in the right hand), the effect is that of the variations of a passacaglia. The voice spins a long melody with spacious and contented line. The most famous section of the piece introduces the call of the cuckoo in the pine forest (‘Der Kuckuck ruft aus Zweiggeflecht’), and this is indeed one of Schubert’s most illustrative ornithological moments with the pianist’s right hand gently imitating the cuckoo in falling minor thirds.

12: The poem’s final strophe is a continuation of the previous feeling – the first time that the so-called antistrophe has completely harmonized with its companion and not developed an opposite viewpoint. There is one more dramatic surprise – more water music, the sound of the torrent achieved through rumbling left-hand basses in conjunction with the right-hand triplets. This leads through various keys until there is an exquisitely judged, and gradual, return to G major for ‘Was er wünschte, was er liebte’. There is no one better than Schubert in depicting floating and ethereal rapture, particularly when there is a constant accompaniment which stays the same in general terms, altering only in subtle details. The way that these triplets change through the conjunctions and piquant clashes of inner voices (at ‘dem Greisen nun zu teil’) is one of those many Schubertian pleasures appreciated most of all by the pianist. Schubert does nothing by rote: even when he has arrived in the home stretch of a long piece he cannot resist adding and adapting, as he goes, tiny inflections to enrich the music (note the tiny left-hand shudders which are almost inaudible echoes of ‘ein Leben rauh und steil’.) There is no doubt that this final song appears more effective as a result of the upheaval that has gone before; the disadvantage of ending a long song on a slow introspective note is balanced by the sense of peace and fulfilment with which composer and poet implicitly advise us, like Voltaire’s Candide, to find happiness in cultivating our garden.